Of chicken and chicken pox

Kids fall sick sometimes. While we were at VKV Sunpura , two girls started showing signs of chicken-pox. There was no choice but to send them back home since the infection is contagious. Sending them back is not as easy as it sounds. Some of the girls came from places simply referred to as ‘the interior’or ‘hills’. It took days just for a message to reach the parents.

After much co-ordination , a day was fixed . The girls were to be sent by the school jeep to a place called Roing. Relatives would collect them from there.

Since the jeep was going out to Roing, it was decided that we too could go along to see the place. Roing is a large town and we had not seen an Arunachali town till then. We would be visiting one more school and see a handicraft center there .

Since we would be passing through Chappakhowa, a market place, it was also decided that we might as well come back with some fifty hens for the ‘meat day’ at school.

Since Roing is a town, VKV Roing did not have such a sprawling campus. But they did have a computer lab! 

At Roing , only one person had come to collect the girls. We were told that the other girls family are busy with rituals at home. The girl’s mother had died few days back.

We had a sudden realization how isolated this place is. There was no way for the news of the mothers death to reach the school . There were small pockets of technology and communication , but the vast majority of the land was remote , isolated and raw nature.

We visited the handicraft center and we drove to the bank of the Debang river. We went upto a big steel bridge there . Across the bridge is a rough road that goes all the way to China border. The river was bone dry when we went there , but every few years , this bridge gets uprooted from it’s foundations and it gets thrashed about when the river gets angry. The old bridges lie down stream in a tangled heap. Repairs are impossible. The army builds a new bridge in a few days.

The views were breathtaking . We were soaking in new things . Our experience at the government handicraft center was almost hilarious . But the whole day was shrouded in the grief , shock of the news of  the mothers death.

By late afternoon we were back at Chappakhowa. Our hens were ready at the market. All fifty of them were packed in a big bamboo basket shaped like a boat a good six feet long. We could not tie the basket to the top of the jeep since it was raining.

Sharing passenger space with four humans and fifty hens under hot humid canvas is not a nice experience . They were making the whole place dirty and the stink was unbearable.

We finally Sunpura reached back in the evening craving for a bath and some hot tea.

This could have easily qualified as a really bad day for us . True, we heard some bad news and had a really uncomfortable ride, but we were also soaking up new things and new concepts every time we turned our heads.

A silver lining to the dark cloud was a chance meeting at VKV Roing with a person who is almost a legend in Arunachal .

Satyanarayanji is an old man in kurta pajama with twinkling eyes and a smile. When we met him , he had arrived from Anini . That’s across the Debang River near China. He had hopped rides in Army trucks to get here. It had taken him a couple of days. All he had with him was a shabnam bag with a shawl and a set of extra clothes. Luggage tied him down. Lots of things get done, he said, if our needs are less. Decades ago he had come to Arunachal leaving a government job at Kerala. His job was to look after administration of the far flung schools . But he is doing definitely more than that.

To all the children , he is uncle Moosa. Wherever he goes kids flock to meet him and listen to his stories. Kids eagerly wait for his arrival at their school as he also brings messages from far away homes. He is relentless in his mission of making sure education reaches the children in Arunachal.

Sometimes it took him months to convince parents to send the kids to school. Two such girls he knew were at  Sunpura . He wanted to come with us to meet them and talk to them. We could not take him along as the very last inch of space in our vehicle was going to be taken up by the chicken on our way back.

The few moments we spent with him are treasured. We could have spent a few days together had it not been for the chicken . When we met him, we talked about medicinal plants. A google search tells me he is still in Arunachal and that last year he set up a string of free libraries for the kids. 

The Telephone Exchange

Imagine running a school with three hundred girls without a telephone. There was a telephone in the school. It had been out of order since the past six months. Communication with the outside world was possible only in cases of emergency by rushing to the police station and relaying a wireless message.

We had been cooped up in the school due to the rains since our arrival. The principal got the idea that we could accompany her to the local telephone exchange in the jeep so that we could at least see the surrounding countryside and she could check up how the repairs are progressing.

The telephone exchange turned out to be a tower and a room half a kilometer off the tarred road. We were in Arunachal but we were still close enough to Assam for BSNL to be extra careful about their assets. The tower and room were surrounded by a thick and very tall reinforced concrete wall with one small strong steel gate.

An extraordinary scene greeted us when we went through that gate. One look inside and at the keeper of this telephone exchange and what I instantly thought of was Robinson Crusoe.

The poor man was living all alone in his fortress with no work for the past six months surrounded by strange tribal folk. To pass the time and probably to prevent himself from going crazy, he had kept himself buzy with his tiny plot of land within the tall wall.

With plenty of time, a bore well and the wonderful Arunachal weather so condusive for vegetative growth, this man had made himself a garden of eden on government property.

Vegetables grew in neat rows . There were chickens scampering about . There was even a small hut in a corner for some goats he had bought.

This exchange served a grand total of seventy two customers . Some electronic parts had gone bad . Finding a person to deliver the parts and to fit them properly was the real challenge. 

The school telephone did start ringing eventually . It took six more moths after our return to Pune. The school was without a phone for more than a year.

Sunshine

It was always raining . Out of the thirty days we were in Arunachal, the sun was out for five. One such rare occasion was when we were at Sunpura. We finished the dawn prayers and to our surprise, classes were given off since the Sun was out.

It seems that the children knew the sunny day drill well. Within minutes , the whole campus turned into a washing machine. Every available hand was washing clothes, linen, curtains and what not. After a few hours the school looked like a carnival decorated with flapping colorful garments.

Later I saw a flock of small girls near the temple ,picking something from the grass. There was a huge silk cotton tree behind the temple. It’s pods had burst that day, showering the cotton all around . The girls were picking this cotton. The cotton was discarded. The seeds, carefully removed ,shelled delicately with teeth and nails and eaten.

Too much effort for a snack smaller than half a peanut. I am sure when they learnt it from their grandmothers , it was all fun and game and a tasty snack. What it actually did was it increased their attention span, taught them patience and drilled deep inside them that food is hard work. This is the magic of tribal education.

Girls joined school at class three. These smaller girls were more in touch with nature. As they progressed to higher classes , education eroded the local knowledge they had received in the hills from their parents and elders. The oldest girls in the school were in class eight. This class was thoroughly confused. They had lost enough of their tribe’s knowledge to be looked down upon by the village elders. School gave them education that was more or less useless in their world. Their only hope was for development to reach them.  With development , these educated youths hoped to be a bridge between the two worlds.

DBS , Cold Baths and the Harmonium

VKV Sunpura was a girls school with 300 students. It used to be a boys school. We were told of an incident from the boys school days that truly describes what Arunachal really is all about.

 The school then was not as well developed . Boys used to be lined up at a hand pump for their bath. Standing in line for a cold bath was not exactly very exciting for the boys so they used to throw stones at birds , actually hit them , leave the line for some time, light a small fire , have a little snack and rejoin the line in time for their bath !

It was with a chance encounter with a leech that we discovered that even our friendly girl students had a wild side. Back home they told us , or , in the hills as they say it, a nice way to pass the time is to turn a big leech inside out and watch it turn back right side out!

I don’t know if this can really be done. None of my scientist friends have tried it so even they don’t know.

Food at the school followed the DBS system . Dal , Bhat and Sabji . Meat was served once a month. Someone had the brilliant idea of cutting the food bill by rearing goats at the school. This seemed feasible as the school campus is more than sixty acres , most of it unused farmland. The students refused to eat the goats they had reared so it was back to market bought chicken with the additional trouble of keeping the goats out of the teachers’ lovingly tended gardens.

Teachers were mostly from south India. Kerala to be precise. No where else are there people willing to leave home for such a remote place for a teachers salary .They lived in small cottages with tiny gardens in front. The cottages were a little raised, frames of wood and walls made of a composite of bamboo and cement. All of them were a uniform blue that one gets on mixing indigo with lime. One of the teachers was going on leave, so her cottage got allocated to us. We also inherited a cat and her two tiny kittens.

It dawns early in Arunachal. We used to get up at five and go to the school temple after a freezing cold bath. We assumed , since there was no hot water connection to the cottage, freezing cold baths are what all true arunachalis take. A few days later, one of the teachers made a casual enquiry about what we were doing about our bath. On hearing that we were taking cold baths , he was truly shocked! He took us to the kitchen and there , on the biggest wood burning chulha we had ever seen sat a humongous vessel full of hot water. All the hot water we needed had always been just a call away .

 By the time we discovered hot water at the school, we had started enjoying to the cold baths at dawn.  It was as if the cold bath was the first thrill of the day.

One day we met the school harmonium. It was an exceptionally sweet sounding instrument. But it could play only two select bhajans . The reason being , it had lost a lot of springs and all the cavities had been stuffed with rags and silk cotton to prevent it from droning unwanted notes. Some notes that were necessary but had no springs were operated  after keeping stones on the board. The school did have another harmonium, it was in the same sorry state , but the children never used it since the first one sounded better. Repairing the poor thing ment taking it at least to Assam , but no one seemed keen enough to cross the Bramhaputra with the heavy load.

I talked to the principal and it was decided that the harmonium had to be saved even if it ment sacrificing the other one.

Next  afternoon , I sat with my swiss knife and the two harmoniums. Surrounded by eager bunch of girls from class three and started a transplant of sorts . First to come out were about half a kg of stones and a medium sized plastic bag full of rags and cotton . We stripped both the harmoniums among oohs , aahs and giggles and after a good one and half hour we put them together again. The girls got their instrument back. All the keys working and all the notes sounding sweet.

If it had not been for the Victorinox, I am sure the girls would still be playing the same two songs. 

The Journey

April 2001 exactly a year after our wedding , in fact on our first anniversary, we are on a train going east. Both of us had taken a month off and we were heading to Arunachal Pradesh.

2001 does not sound too long ago , but that’s pre cell phone era and most of our correspondence with our friends and contacts there were delivered by a postman.

The train journey was not much to write about . Our  plane from Calcutta to Dibrugarh landed at an airport so tiny , it reminded me of our local post office .

A jeep took us to Vivekanand Kendra , Dibrugarh , set on the banks of the Bramhaputra. We spent a nice evening on the terrace there , watching the mighty river flow by. 


Everyone here has a story about the great river . Some  years ago this very building started getting phone calls from schools up stream in Arunachal about flooding. After every call , people watched out of the windows and sensed nothing different. Few hours later the whole of the first floor was under water. This is the story that welcomed us here . And we were not even in Arunachal yet.

Whatever the distance to be traveled, no one here starts off on an empty stomach , simply because they  just don’t know when they will reach . 


We left in the jeep . Ram from the Vivekanand kendra was to accompany us to the school at Sunpura.

Some rain and some flat tires later , we were at Sadiya Ghat to cross the Bramhaputra. The Bramhaputra changes course often so a few kilometers  before the river is a wasteland . A sandy desert with hidden dangers . We went past a number of jeeps and buses stuck in the sand. 


The ferry was at the jetty so we were spared the wait. The ferry was actually two diesel powered wooden launches tied together with coir rope. On planks laid across the two boats, were a minibus, a car , a few bikes and lots of people.

We reached the other side after two and a half hours. A bus was waiting to take us ahead. It was waiting four kilometers away. We walked through the sand . 


Whatever the situation , people here always find something to be thankful for. We were thankful that we were carrying rucksacks not suitcases and it was not raining.

Two more bus changes later we were at the border post to present our Inner Line Permit. The various busses had all been so jam packed, we had not seen any landscape from the windows. We had just stolen some glimpses of rolling plains and fields. Every where in Assam , we could some how sense the fear and tension in the air. 


 Across the gate , Arunachal had a completely different energy to offer us. Tall trees , clean air, bird chirping and no policemen with guns all around.

The bus left us at the school gate .  VKV Sunpura was going to be our home for the next ten days. 


A train , a plane, jeep , boat , a long walk and four busses later , we had finally arrived . We were lucky they said . Sometimes , a tractor , an elephant or simply a few more days are added to the list.